Al Overton
Baseball. Football.
Soccer?
Soccer was, and remains, the outlier.
Yet some three decades after first agreeing to help coach the youth soccer team of his son, Graham, Al Overton remains a fixture around and on the pitch.
“My soccer started when my son was in kindergarten, as a matter of fact for a few years I helped coach, and then as P.T. Barnum said, There’s a sucker born every day,” Overton joked. “Then, I had some guys come up to me when we lived in Mississippi and asked if I had ever thought about refereeing soccer and if I wanted to help out.
“That was in 1994, I got certified as a US Soccer Federation referee. Couple years later, while still living in Mississippi, I got certified to do high school. Then in 2002, while living in Murfreesboro, I got back into high school officiating.”
Since that time, Overton has filled myriad roles for the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association – from helping to officiate boys’ and girls’ soccer, to becoming an area assignor and supervisor to finally helming officiating assignments for the TSSAA State Championships.
For these duties and his decades of service, Overton has been selected as a 2025-26 TSSAA Distinguished Service Award recipient.
With no soccer background and unknowingly on the cusp of having dedicated more than three decades to the sport, Overton knows what he would tell himself now back in 1994 when it all began.
“It’s probably going to be an extremely satisfying journey, a long and varied journey but everything about it is tremendously satisfying,” said Overton, a Tennessee Tech alum. “I forget who said it, but if you find something you really enjoy in life, then you don’t have to call it a job. I get paid for what I do, but I still don’t look on it as a job.
“I’m semi-retired, but I work seven days a week. Between high school, club and college (soccer, where Overton also has officiated and risen to the role of assignor), it’s not a job.”
With rain inundating much of the Midstate area in recent weeks, Overton has been scrambling to find windows of playable weather coupled with the life challenges of juggling the different lives of referees who also have families and jobs.
“I get a tremendous amount of satisfaction when people tell me I would not do what you do. Just this week for instance, middle school playoffs are starting up, there’s been tremendous rain, and it’s been a real challenge to get games scheduled, rescheduled and to make adjustments.
“It’s like putting a giant puzzle together and you get that satisfaction when you finally do get those.”
Moments of satisfaction are what define his time assisting the TSSAA, Overton said.
“Highlights for me from the TSSAA standpoint always were for me back in the day when I had the opportunity to work State Championship week for the boys and for the girls. It was just always a real highlight when you’re selected to do those games.’
And, it’s been doing those games, making those assignments and being around a sport he’s grown to love with his family always supporting him, even if wife, Lisa, is nonplused by her sports-fanatic husband.
“My wife is very unique, everything I do is centered around sports somehow, some way; soccer, I play golf, watch baseball, she’s a widow every Saturday because I am a huge college football fan,” said Overton, who also noted the support of his daughter, Mary Beth, as well as his son. “But if she never went to a sporting event, she’d be happy.
“In the offseason when I’m around the house and driving her crazy, she’ll always ask, ‘When does soccer season start back up?’.”
TSSAA proudly salutes Al Overton for his many years of dedicated service as an official in the state of Tennessee.
